Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

GALACTIC ARCHIVES:

The original title of the greater part of what we have collected in this book under the title Schrodinger's Cat was The Universe Next Door. The book of that name was begun as a sequel to llluminatus!, but after several editors in a row suffered psychotic breakdowns while reading it, publishers defensively ordered that any ms. with that title, from Robert Anton Wilson, should be returned unopened.

"People generally do not want a new form of prose fiction to replace the hackneyed 'novel,' " Wilson wrote in a letter to his friend Malaclypse the Younger. "There never has been a serious attempt since Odysseus."

Schrodinger's Cat Fair Copy #2, according to Wilson scholars, incorporates later and still more bizarre material, the text of which was allegedly dictated to Wilson by a canine intelligence-"vast, cool, and unsympathetic"- from the system of the Dog Star, Sirius. Schrodinger's Cat Fair Copy #3 appeared much later, in 2031, under mysterious circumstances. Some claimed, at the time, that it had been received by a trance medium to whom Wilson had "broadcast" it after his melodramatic departure from this world in 1993. Skeptics have always insisted that the alleged medium actually found it in an old tampon box in her attic. A legend about the manuscript being recovered from the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco, after the earthquake of 2005, and passed around among adepts of certain occult groups, is probably mythical.

Various alternative texts, generally considered forgeries, have circulated at intervals and many Wilson scholars debate heatedly whether this final ms. is, in fact, totally or even in major part Wilson's work. That two authors at least are here represented, often at cross-purposes with each other, is the emerging academic consensus at this time.

The present edition incorporates all material that is undoubtedly Wilson's, together with matter of such a Wilsonian and weird character that the present editor regards it as probably-Wilson's-within-reasonable-doubt.

It only remains to affirm that Schrodinger's Cat, contrary to appearances, is not a mere "routine" or "shaggy shoggoth story." Despite his sinister reputation and his well-known eccentricities, Wilson was one of the last of the scientific shamans of the primitive, terrestrial phase of the cruel, magnificent Unistat Empire. This may be hard to understand when many Establishment scholars still deny that anything like scientific shamanism existed in the twentieth century, but it is nevertheless well documented that Wilson, Leary, Lilly, Crowley, Castaneda, and many others pursued rigorous studies in scientific shamanic research even under the persecution of the "neurological police" so characteristic of that barbaric epoch.* Some have even proposed that Schrodinger's Cat is actually a manual of shamanism in the form of a novel, but that opinion is, almost certainly, exaggerated.

*See the Editor's "Clandestine Neurotransmitter Research Under the Holy Inquisition and the D.E.A.," Archives of General Archaeology, Vol. 23, No. 17.